TV Reviews : Stack Is Back as the ‘Untouchable’ Ness

Robert Stack has dusted off G-man Eliot Ness and revived him in the Chicago gangland of 1947, but these bullet-riddled streets aren’t the same without hoods like Frank Nitti or Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat narration.

“The Return of Eliot Ness” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) does enjoy some of the lurid trappings of its famous TV namesake (“The Untouchables,” 1959-63) but the mobsters aren’t as flamboyant or as much fun in the “Godfather”-like, post-Capone era dramatized here.

The tone is nicely set with opening, sepia-colored archival footage of 1947 downtown Chicago (so period-perfect that the movie marquees are trumpeting the movie releases “Calcutta” and “The Jolson Story”). The fictional plot is triggered in the following image of a front page banner headlining Al Capone’s death, followed by a cop muttering that “syphilis got him before we could.”

With Big Al’s demise unleashing warfare among his minions, Ness comes out of retirement to avenge the murder of an investigator friend who is vividly gunned down in a hotel room over the beautiful corpse of a gangland moll. Their criss-crossed cadavers make a great shot on the front page of the Windy City tabs.

Stack, to his credit, is still the same upright, humorless gangbuster 28 years after the last “Untouchables” TV show. The story, scripted by Michael Petryni and helmed by James Contner, is still (happily) a fantasy.

The chatter of Tommy guns stitches characters to the pavement while a crime lord (Philip Bosco)--unlike Prohibition-era thugs--grows roses in his greenhouse and yearns for peace.